Start Up Revolutionises Breast Screening

Matakina is a Wellington start up on a mission to enable earlier detection of breast cancer, by diagnosing more accurately and treating more effectively. Their approach is to use best practice digital imaging developed by world-class innovators to allow the breast cancer screening process to be tailored to fit each individual woman.

“We have a vision for helping the millions of women who are screened for breast cancer every year. Although the barriers to success are high (medical devices are highly regulated) we believe if we can overcome those barriers then millions of women will be better off for it,” says CEO Ralph Highnam.

“Breast imagers have a number of imaging tools at their disposal to use when diagnosing, such as mammography, ultrasound and MRI. But how do you know which is the best technique to use? Wouldn’t it be great if a number grading tissue density just popped up on your mammography workstation and from that you knew which imaging tool was optimal? That’s the idea behind Volpara, a software application that Matakina hopes to have on the market in the US (and being trialled globally) later in 2010.

Highnam has been involved in the development of breast quantification software for years and received a Ph.D. in 1992 in the subject from the University of Oxford. He set up his company in Wellington due to the innovative and forward looking clinicians based here and the presence of large numbers of high quality software engineers with experience of handling images thanks to the film industry.

Grow Wellington helped Matakina get its first TechNZ grant of around $30,000 last June and thus the boost it needed to move to the next stage. “And we used Grow Wellington’s Intellectual Property services to secure a provisional patent which keeps our technology secret whilst providing protection.”

The company plans to start its commercialization efforts by placing the software at luminary breast centres in the U.S., but it also seeks relationships with distributors as well as mammography OEMs that might incorporate Volpara into their mammography reading workstation software. The company plans to begin placing fully integrated clinical systems into the US in August 2010 after first trialling them in New Zealand.

Highnam believes that Volpara could some day help answer some of the thorny questions about who should receive mammography screening and how often.